From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The most corrupting idea about power is that it gives you a set of techniques to enable you to get more of what you want, no questions asked. If we think about power in that way, our soul will get eroded.
There's a vested interest – if the ideas you're teaching and have worked on are completely abandoned in favour of something else, then your legacy goes to zero. I think that's a big force.
Human beings are naturally liberal about these things, human beings are naturally in pursuit of wealth and in pursuit of love and in pursuit of pleasure. I think that happens more in the West or in developed places because it's more accepted there.
We are all strategists or game theorists at heart – it took several decades of people writing-down models and articles before we recognised what we know from playing poker; we don't know our opponent's hand.
When you have the confidence that you really are an expert closer, you're a competent closer, the word no doesn't matter, because you know that there's going to be a certain number of no's and a certain number of yes's.
The key component of bravery is integrity. What I saw growing up was the reality that people would often give their integrity to make life more comfortable in the short term; but guess what, that leads to your integrity being chipped away until you are left with nothing.
We all inhabit distinctive inner universes. We all see and experience the world in a slightly different way. Understanding perception has a lot of consequences for understanding who we are.
If you're not an action sport athlete, and you spend all your time chasing action sport athletes around mountains and across oceans, you're going to break things… I broke 82 bones and realized that if I didn't take my obsession beyond action sports that I would kill myself.
Doing something that has never been done before is terrifying… all the people who love you will tell you not to do it… not because they're jealous, but because they're genuinely scared for you… they're worried for your wellbeing.
Growing up, I was a speech and debate kid – and I realised that anytime I made the judges laugh, I would automatically get 10-15 points higher on my final score! Comedy, and making people laugh, has the power to engender empathy and to make people like you.
As children we experience a domestication process the same way animals do, where rather than having who we are, our authenticity, our essence unlocked for us, instead we have put upon us layers and layers of rules. We take this very complicated, confusing, and demoralising code of behaviour into our adulthood with us.
Performance is a mental construction. You have to be present in your own body and mind, and when you achieve that presence, you can transcend physical and mental limitations.